I'm a plagiarizer and I didn't even know it... erizer.

Four years ago I started writing what was to be the hilariously damning, creative story that defined growing up in Panama City Beach. It centered around a protagonist that you'd find growing up anywhere in PCB. It was a little angsty but it flowed and everyone that saw what I had written loved it. My magnum opus, so to speak.

Maybe one day I'll post what I had written so far on here but I had previously posted snippets here on CN to much fanfare. A few days ago I opened the file, which I touch from time to time, to add a few more pages of content. It reminded me how much I not only like writing but reading as well. So I picked up BEE's Less Than Zero today and started chugging away at it.

By page two I was thinking to myself "Jeez, this sounds just like what I wrote back in high school." The tone of the main character and the theme of hating your hometown were already resounding in the first few paragraphs. Then, on page three, I was floored.

Bret Easton Ellis used the same EXACT scene in his story, written ten years ago, that I wrote in my story. The character sits back on their bed and looks at the wall, lamenting the poster of Elvis Costello on the wall. The poster, the internal dialog, and just... it was the same thing.

It's not like I feel this is some spooky cosmic coincidence or anything, but it is weird that BEE would include a scene just like mine in a story with the same overtones as mine. When I was writing it back in high school, I was knee-deep in Chuck Palahniuk novels like every other smart and slightly depressed teenager of our time. What I wanted to do was write something with the same dejected transgressional fiction as Chuck with a youthful perspective that damned my hometown.

Sound familiar?

I only knew halfway who BEE was back in high school. Just the American Psycho guy. Little did I know that my choice of reading material and my upbringing would turn me into his little literary progeny.